Strays by Garrett Leigh

Author:Garrett Leigh [Leigh, Garrett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2017-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

Lenny glanced around the bizarre hipster café. “I can’t believe you talked me into coming back here.”

“Thought you said you hadn’t been here before?”

“I meant Camden in general.”

“Oh.” Nero poked suspiciously at the chocolate-marshmallow sundae he’d bought Lenny for his dinner. “I thought you were too hyped up from your sugar rush to care.”

He had a point. Months ago, Lenny had watched the Cereal Killer Café set up with eager anticipation, but life had moved him on before it had opened, and he’d forgotten all about it until Nero had gently coerced him off the Tube in Camden. “This is lush. Sure you don’t want to try it?”

“I’m good. There’s a tapas place round the corner. I’ll get something there.”

“Works for me.”

They left the cereal bar behind, bought Nero some spicy potatoes that seemed to cheer him up to no end, and drifted to a nearby park. They ate in companionable silence until Lenny noticed Nero’s scowl return. “What’s up? Still fretting about that bus?”

Outside the warehouse, they’d made plans for Nero to work on the abandoned bus while Lenny painted the walls, but he hadn’t seemed hopeful that he could get it running without having it towed. “A bit,” Nero admitted. “It’s going to take a lot of money to make it into something that pays for itself.”

“You don’t think the bosses will pay?”

“I don’t know if I want them to. I kinda . . . I think I want to do it by myself, maybe.”

“Okaaay.” Lenny scraped the last of his cereal-studded ice cream into his mouth. Urban Soul paid well above average wages, and Nero was about as senior as it got outside the holy trinity of men in charge. Add in the fact that rent on the flat above Pippa’s was minimal, and it wasn’t inconceivable that Nero had cash to throw at a derelict minibus. “So what’s stopping you?”

Nero shrugged. “I’m crap at making decisions. I’d probably fuck it up.”

The logic made no sense to Lenny. Nero never fucked anything up. He ran the kitchen with an iron fist, managed Lenny’s impromptu chef career, ran a million errands for Urban Soul every week, and— Ah. “You mean you’re shit at making decisions for yourself . . . because you spend your whole life running around after everyone else.”

“I like it that way. Keeps me out of bother.”

“How much bother could you get into with that old bus? It doesn’t even start.”

Nero shrugged again, and his nonanswer didn’t matter, because the bus was hardly the point. Beneath it all, Lenny was fairly sure Nero’s reluctance to take the project on alone stemmed from the fact that he didn’t believe he deserved the rewards it would bring.

“I think you should do it,” Lenny said. “Say it does go tits up, how bad could it be? You’ve lived through worse, right?”

“Lenny, mate, you won’t ever know what I’ve lived through.”

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